Juanita Brooks honored by historical association

Juanita Brooks, widely known for her ground-breaking 1950 chronicle of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, has been honored posthumously by the Mormon History Association.

ST. GEORGE — Jaunita Brooks, widely known for her ground-breaking 1950 chronicle of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, has been honored posthumously by the Mormon History Association.

Meeting this weekend in St. George for its annual conference, the association presented a special citation at an awards banquet Friday evening. Two of her surviving children and their spouses received the award for Brooks, a longtime resident of St. George.

The book, widely reviewed throughout the United States, laid the blame for the massacre on the Mormon militiamen of Iron County, Utah, who carried it out as well as Mormon leaders whose preaching inflamed their zeal, the citation noted.

"However, Juanita's arraignment of the guilty was tempered by a deep compassion. She understood that those who carried out the massacre were fundamentally good and decent men led by circumstances to commit a deed for which their own conscience condemned them."

The following awards for articles and books published within the past year were presented:

Juanita Brooks Graduate Student Paper Award: Jared Tamez, "The Construction of Race and Colonizing Mexican Mormons in the Mexican Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1879-1889), University of Texas - El Paso.

Geraldine McBride Woodward International Mormon History Award: Raymond M. Kuehne, Mormons as Citizens of a Communist State: A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in East Germany, 1945-1990 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010).

R. Scott Lloyd is a reporter and staff writer for the Deseret News, where he is attached full time to the LDS Church News staff, working in that capacity for the 25-plus years he has been with the newspaper. Prior to that more ..